Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [146]
“When I got down from the ship,” he wrote, “they made me climb into a coach. I hoped then that they would bring me before a tribunal, there to make an account of my conduct, and there to be judged. But far from that; without giving me an instant of repose, they took me, to a fort on the frontiers of the Republic, where they have shut me into a terrible cell.'3 At times, Toussaint's plaints in his memoir strike a tragic note: “They have sent me to France naked as a worm; they have seized my property and my papers; they have spread the most atrocious calumnies on my account. Is this not to cut off someone's legs and order him to walk? Is it not to cut out his tongue and tell him to talk? Is it not to bury a man alive?”4
First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte made no direct reply to any of these messages. At the same time he was receiving frequent letters, with a weirdly similar tone, from Captain General Leclerc, whose ostensible mission had been to relieve Toussaint Louverture of his post as gover-nor general of Saint Domingue, and who had done so at the cost of most of the men in his very large command, not to mention the ruin of his own health. “As for myself,” wrote Leclerc,
I have always served you with devotion; I will continue, I will execute all your orders to the letter. I will justify the good opinion that you have of me, but I cannot resign myself to stay on here next summer. Since I have been here I have had nothing but the spectacle of fires, insurrections, assassinations, the dead and the dying. My soul is shriveled, no mirthful idea can make me forget these hideous scenes. I struggle here against the blacks, against the whites, against poverty and penuriousness in money, against my discouraged army. When I have spent another six months in this style, I will have the right to claim repose. As for Madame Leclerc, she is ill, and a model of courage; she is very much worthy to be your sister.
Let me know, I beg you, what measures you have taken to come to my rescue; but do not send me my army in pieces; send me some good corps and no more debris like the greater part of the battalions I have so far received.5
Dated October 7, 1802, this letter was Leclerc's last. By the time it reached France, he was already dead—along with some fifty thousand of the eighty thousand troops who had been sent to subdue the Negro rebellion in Saint Domingue. Though outmaneuvered by his enemy, Toussaint Louverture managed to outlive him, hanging on in his frigid cell till April 1803.
What Toussaint wanted and, in his prison, did his best to lobby for, was Napoleon's judgment of the case between himself and Leclerc. Sometimes he put the request with a naive simplicity that may have been feigned: “If two children fight each other, shouldn't their father or mother stop them from doing so, find out which is the aggressor, punish that one or punish them both, in the case that both of them are wrong? By the same token, General Leclerc had no right to have me arrested. The government alone could have had us both arrested, could have heard and judged us. Meanwhile General Leclerc enjoys liberty, while here I am at the bottom of this cell!”6
Though Napoleon declined to render any judgment of the case that Toussaint was trying to construct between himself and Leclerc, he did finally admit, in the memoir written at Saint Helena after his definitive fall from power, that he had been wrong to oppose